Checking in with the 2016 Presidential Election

In another month, the US Democratic and Republican parties will meet at their conventions to officially select a candidate for President of the United States. However, as the final primary is held this week in Washington, D.C., each party already has its presumptive nominee – Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. So, how are these candidates performing on Twitter?Here’s a quick glance at Twitter volumes from the past month about the two candidates. Trump leads the tweet count race, with 16.5 million monthly tweets, compared to Clinton with 9.1 million tweets. About 50% of each candidate’s total tweets are @mentions, and about 30% are retweets.

Trump received a record 390k retweets on June 12, the day of the shooting at the Orlando night club Pulse. Many of these retweets were expressions of disgust or anger toward Trump and his tweets about the event. Clinton’s record retweet day was just a few days earlier, on June 9, when she (or more likely, someone on her social team) posted this all-too-hip tweet:

When you look further back, the gap between the candidates widens, with Trump earning more than 88 million tweets so far in 2016, and Clinton sitting just under 35 million. Interestingly, Bernie Sanders trails Clinton only slightly in yearly tweet volume.

However, if you look more closely at what Twitter is saying now, there’s a much smaller gap between Clinton and Trump. In the past week, there have been 5.2 million tweets about Trump and 4.1 million tweets about Clinton. Will this trend continue? We’ll keep an eye on it! We’ll also be digging into more about what people are saying about the candidates on Twitter, and how this reflects what we see in the polls around the 2016 Presidential Election.